weekend parent
we roll through afternoon
past stone people waiting for the bus
we spoke along
wheels dull as cloud cover
the canal shines
like a second chance
wind and sun play the poplars
the drawbridge hums
the tune i sing
i am seventeen she is forty seven
i duckling behind her
rainbow leg warmers
we somersault down
the lane lined with blackberries
and splashed with shade
just one more curve – one more
we turn back
two miles after we should
nearly home we brake
for fish-n-chips and toss fries for gulls
it hurts to get back on
but we know we will make it
to the house of mirrors
green fern curtains
billowing like sails
over where i rest
in my room of doors
Index of Color
Caput Mortuum
Voice, 5 – 11
“Are you sure?”, 15
“No”, 17
Running up a sleeve, 23
Coming out, bland white apple, 23
See also Mouse
Midnight
Mouse, 3
On the windowsill, 3
Remembering crumbs, 33
Us, 86
Billboard in each others’ lives, 84
Transparent
Rain, 8
Recycling, 6, 7
Snow
Dissolving, 1
Joining the others, 11
No two alike, 2
Forging Departure
– after Charles Simic
Others were leaving
were others
and us leaving
We left behind fire
by becoming smoke
Our tongue was the switchback
Breath the falling/rising road
I saw a child with no string
borne by changing winds
Our arms drifted away from our torsos: less to keep warm
We walked into empire’s din, not looking back
Priya Keefe was raised in a working-class family in Seattle, Washington. Until she was 18, she’d traveled just in three states and British Columbia. Keefe’s poetry has appeared on a Dublin lamppost, in Seattle buses, and in Seattle City Council meetings. It has been spied in Five:2:One, The American Journal of Poetry, Outlook Springs, The Nervous Breakdown, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. Now she teaches in a small town in Southern Louisiana and shares a home with her partner, her mother, and too many pets.